How Google’s TPUs are reshaping the economics of large-scale AI

For more than a decade, Nvidia’s GPUs have underpinned nearly every major advance in modern AI. That position is now being challenged. Frontier models such as Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Opus were trained not on Nvidia hardware, but on Google’s latest Tensor Processing Units, the Ironwood-based TPUv7. This signals that a viable alternative to the GPU-centric AI stack has already arrived — one with real implications for the economics and archite